We've got a Sharp Zaurus at work that is intended to be a target platform for a engineer's terminal onto our systems to save engineers from having to scale 20M variable message sign gantries with a laptop in tow; naturally, I've taken the opportunity of having a play with it :-)

The hidden keyboard is a great idea, and the interface is nice; getting a shell on a handheld was an odd notion.

The feature set is broad; possibly broader than that which you get with PPC-based devices. Of course, given that we need this thing to run a single app, it's not something we're too concerned with.

From a build quality point of view (and, given the task we need this device to do, it's something we care about) it's well built and exceeded my expectations. iPaqs look nice (and so they should, given the cost) but aren't actually built too well. The screens in particular degrade over time, becoming unresponsive to the stylus, and the cradle is a cheap and nasty piece of tacky plastic. My smartphone has a better cradle(!).

I like the Zaurus; it's well priced, well specified, and has a nice software environment that's friendly to developer and user alike. We'll see how this pans out in reality when we give one to a hairy-arsed engineer up a gantry in a British November rainstorm :-)